The project
The title of the project: An Integrative Approach of Clausal Adjuncts in Present-day Media Discourse of Romance Languages
Project acronym: ROAMED
The aim of this project is twofold. Firstly, it aims at identifying certain syntactic and semantic-pragmatic features of complex sentences (CSs) with clausal adjuncts in Contemporary Romanian. Secondly, it puts forward a comparative analysis between different Romance Languages (Romanian, Italian, French, and Spanish) as concerns the features mentioned above. The research is oriented towards two aspects: on the one hand, it investigates the corpus extracted from online mainstream media (international magazines and national newspapers), containing articles collected and organized by the researcher in a database, and, on the other hand, it provides arguments to sustain the specific features of Romanian in the Romance context. The following topics are to be considered: (i) the structure of CSs with clausal adjuncts (temporal, locative, causal, and concessive adjuncts); (ii) inventory of connectors; (iii) order of the constituents; (iv) discursive phenomena and information structure. The innovative character of the research proposal resides in three aspects. The first one concerns the collection of an original corpus of data extracted from the four above mentioned Romance languages and construction of an electronic database with all the contexts (including the structures investigated). The second aspect is related to the integrative theoretical framework applied, which combines concepts of modern Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics. The third element of innovation is related to the cross-linguistic perspective employed in the analysis, in order to emphasize the homogeneity and diversity aspects of the Romance sister languages. Previous approaches (GALR 2005, GBLR 2010, The Grammar of Romanian 2013), while fruitful, have treated the syntactic constituents of a complex sentence using a general descriptive perspective, but avoided comparisons. From this point of view, the project proposed is meant to fill in a gap in the literature as far as the Romanian data are concerned.